The Internet has fostered the growth of many new techniques for transacting business. One technique that has enjoyed success is electronic bidding. In a typical electronic bidding scenario, a buyer submits a search term to a bidding service. The search term describes an item that the user wishes to purchase. Assume, for example, that the buyer is interested in purchasing a CD by a hypothetical artist, John Smith. The buyer might therefore enter the search term “John Smith”. The electronic bidding service responds by presenting a list of one or more offers for items that match the search term. For instance, the electronic bidding service may present a list of recordings being offered by different sellers that feature the artist John Smith. Each of these offers includes a textual and/or pictorial description of the item being offered, created by the respective sellers of the items.
In typical practice, the buyer will examine the list of matching offers to determine whether one of more of the offers match the buyer's needs. The buyer can then optionally place a bid on a selected offer. If the bid proves successful (vis-à-vis other potential bids), the electronic bidding service allows the buyer to consummate the transaction by purchasing the selected item. At this stage, for instance, the electronic bidding service may inform the buyer of the total costs involved in the transaction, which may involve shipping costs, taxes, and other potential costs. The buyer may then specify a preferred mode of payment, a preferred mode of shipment, and so forth. On the other hand, if the bid is not successful, the buyer may opt to repeat the above-described process by again examining the list of candidate offers, selecting another offer which meets the buyer's needs, and then placing a bid on that other offer.
While the above-described model has proven viable, it is not without shortcomings. As can be appreciated from the above description, a typical electronic bidding service requires the buyer to make several selections at different junctures in the bidding process. A buyer may regard this aspect of the electronic bidding service as cumbersome. This potential drawback is exacerbated in those cases in which the buyer's bid fails, requiring the buyer to essentially start over from the beginning of the bidding process.
One aspect of the bidding process that a buyer may find particularly onerous is the identification of an offer that matches the buyer's needs. In actual practice, multiple sellers might be offering the same item via the electronic bidding service, such as the same CD by the artist John Smith. However, conventional electronic bidding services do not include a mechanism for alerting the buyer to the fact that two or more offers may pertain to the same item. This creates potential confusion for the buyer, as different sellers will create different textual and/or pictorial descriptions of the items, and the buyer may have difficulty in determining whether the different descriptions actually pertain to the same item. Thus, if a bid is unsuccessful for an offer associated with a particular item, the buyer may have difficulty identifying other offers for the same item.
For at least the above-identified reasons, there is a need for more satisfactory electronic bidding strategies.